The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards®

Prologue

A True Tragedy

THEY COULD ALWAYS HEAR HIM COMING. A big man with a bum hip, Allan Carr walked slowly through the rooms of Hillhaven Lodge, his sprawling brick mansion down a private road in Benedict Canyon, a mile north of the Beverly Hills Hotel. His feet dragged a little, and his cane squeaked, then thwacked into the hardwood floors. The house was dimly lit, quiet, and warm, with a gleam from the fireplace reflecting off the polished floor. In the winter of 1989, staff members for the 61st Academy Awards often sat in the study waiting for Carr, and they heard him a couple of rooms away: the shuffle of his feet, but mostly the sound of the cane skidding on the floor, then slamming down. Creak … whap. Creak … whap. Creak … whap. He arrived in his robe and in pain, but the man knew how to make an entrance.

Everybody said the same thing about Allan Carr: he was a showman. Carr was short and rotund, swathed in custom caftans when he wasn’t wrapped in a robe or a smoking jacket; his baby face was topped with a tousled blond mop and framed by oversized designer glasses. At fifty-one, he had been a manager, a publicist, a producer, and a master promoter, self- and otherwise. He’d had a hit movie, Grease, and a Broadway smash, La Cage aux Folles. He knew how to make a fuss, how to attract the press, and especially how to throw a party. In fact, he’d installed a fully functioning disco in the basement of Hillhaven Lodge, which had been a more sedate estate in the hands of its former owner, actress Ingrid Bergman.

But the history was beside the point, because Carr, in the early months of 1989, was producing the Academy Awards. Friends said he looked at it as the pinnacle of his career, as his crowning achievement. In interview after interview, he promised that it would be the biggest, the most glamorous, the most beautiful, the most star-studded, the most fabulous Oscars ever.

Carr had been dying to tackle the Oscar assignment ever since he’d put on a particularly festive Governors Ball after the fiftieth-anniversary show in 1978. Expecting a call back then, he was disappointed when it didn’t come; a decade later, though, he eagerly took the unpaid job when it was offered to him by Richard Kahn, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Kahn had originally offered the job to director Gilbert Cates, but when he and Cates couldn’t agree on a direction for the show, he turned to the more flamboyant Carr. Allan was a showman of the first degree, and I wanted to invest our show with the kind of excitement he brought to everything he did, says Kahn. And we got a lot of excitement, much of which we did not expect.

The new producer was not always in the best of moods: between the hip replacement surgery he’d had in October and the torn knee cartilage he suffered in mid-February, he hurt and he was often cranky. He was overly protective of the stars he considered his friends, and sometimes seemed not to trust anybody but himself to deal with them. He seldom appeared at the dingy, windowless, drab green production office on La Cienega Boulevard, preferring to hold court at Hillhaven, where he’d installed a six-foot Oscar statue by the front door. On the occasions when he left the house on Oscar business, associate producer Michael Seligman drove him around. Carr was a heavy, rough passenger: when the show was over, Seligman had to replace the front seat in his Mercedes SLC.

Carr thought fast, talked fast, made decisions instantly. Some of his staffers were inspired and invigorated by his energy and creativity, but he also kept people off-balance, ill at ease, and wary of slipping and setting off his volcanic temper. Douglass M. Stewart, who put together film clips for the show, was reminded of the character played by William Castle in The Day of the Locust, the 1975 film based on Nathanael West’s novel about the excesses of Hollywood. Allan was a flamboyant producer the likes of which are often depicted on-screen, Stewart says. He was the colorful, charismatic figure screaming from the top of a crane before the whole thing came crashing down around him.

What Carr wanted in an Oscar show was old-fashioned, fabulous glamour. I remember going with him for our first survey of the Shrine, says Jeff Margolis, the director of that show, which was held at the aging Shrine Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. He walked in, and I remember him saying, ‘I’m not doing the show here unless they redo all the bathrooms. I want the bathrooms redone, and I want all the hallways and the lobby painted. I want it to smell like it’s brand-new.’ Carr got his renovations, whereupon he had a million tulips flown in from the Netherlands and fifty thousand glass beads affixed to the Shrine’s curtain. There were names for production designer Ray Klausen’s elaborate sets, names that captured the elegance Carr envisioned: Stars and Diamonds, Tiffany Jewels with Crystal Beads and Chiffon Swags, Beaded Victorian Flowers, and The Grand Drape among them.

Off the stage, occupying a corner of the adjoining Shrine Exhibition Hall, was perhaps the grandest space of all. The green room at previous Oscar shows had usually been a utilitarian area where stars could relax during the show; Carr dubbed his version Club Oscar and turned it into the most elaborate green room anybody had ever seen. You never would have known that you were backstage in a theater, says Margolis. It was like you were in some highfalutin club in West Hollywood or New York City.

Some crew members wondered about the producer’s fanatical attention to Club Oscar. Everybody felt he was more concerned about the green room than the show itself, says stage manager Dency Nelson. We thought, The guy knows how to throw parties, but does he really know how to produce an awards show?

But Carr was determined to take care of his stars. He was proud of the people he’d attracted, and proud of the way he was putting them together as part of an overall theme: couples, costars, companions, and compadres. Sure, not all of his plans worked out: Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson declined his offer to be presenters, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward didn’t want to fly, Brigitte Bardot would do it only if she could talk about animal rights, Loretta Young only if she could give out best picture by herself. But Demi Moore and Bruce Willis said yes, as did Michael Caine and Sean Connery and Roger Moore, Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart, Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson, Bob Hope and Lucille Ball.

To kick off this fabulous assemblage, Carr knew he needed a particularly fabulous opening—something to get ’em talking the next day, to announce that these were his Academy Awards. Lavish production numbers had long been an Oscar staple, but in recent years they’d been heavy on technical flash and high-tech trickery. He wanted to simplify it a little bit, says Margolis. He wanted the production numbers to be big and grand like the old Hollywood movie musicals, without laser beams or flash pots or smoke and mirrors.

The answer, Carr decided, lay 350 miles to the north in San Francisco, where the satirical, campy musical revue Beach Blanket Babylon had been a hit for fifteen years. Simultaneously spoofing and celebrating pop culture, creator Steve Silver threw dozens of pop icons together in a deliriously silly extravaganza. Carr persuaded Silver to adapt the show for the Oscars—whereupon, says Seligman, that hellacious opening number just grew and grew.

Silver did much of his work in San Francisco, while Carr remained in L.A. The number became a trip through old Hollywood as taken by a wide-eyed Snow White, a central character in the San Francisco show. She started by speaking with Variety columnist and Oscar greeter Army Archerd, visited the legendary Cocoanut Grove nightclub, went on a blind date with the young star Rob Lowe, and wound up surrounded by dancing usherettes at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Steve kept expanding it, and Allan did not take charge and tell him when to stop, says Seligman. He brought in Merv Griffin, he brought in Rob Lowe … I told him he had to shorten the number, but Allan let it go.

For the Cocoanut Grove section, Carr lined up several tables full of classic stars, including Doris Day, Dorothy Lamour, Cyd Charisse, Vincent Price, and Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. But his biggest coup was to cast the ultimate Oscar-night host, Irving Swifty Lazar, as himself. The reticent Lazar agreed to leave Spago, where he traditionally hosted the hottest Oscar party in town, to table-hop in the number.

At the Shrine, though, even Carr eventually had to face the fact that Silver’s production was too big. "It ended up way, way too long, says Margolis. It became a special in itself. We had to cut it, because we knew you could only push the envelope so far in terms of length and style." Some of those who’d watched rehearsals thought the cuts hurt the number and made it more confusing. Late in the game, Swifty Lazar changed his mind and opted not to leave his own Spago soiree.

By the day of the show, the theater was gleaming and Carr was ready. Elaborately costumed and coiffed dancers from Steve Silver’s number filled the aisles as the broadcast began. I sat down at the Shrine, and the curtain was a dazzling, shimmering, huge piece of sequins and velvet, says Douglass Stewart. "Then these characters filled up the aisles. The whole house was just so intrigued, so curious, so excited about what was going to happen."

Bruce Davis, who would soon assume the post of executive director of the Academy, sat nearby not knowing what to expect. He wanted it to all be a surprise, not only to the audience but to us, says Davis. And when I saw Snow White walk down the aisle and kind of brush by me, I thought, Oh, my God, I wonder if anybody’s cleared that. I knew there were some things you have to do some checking around on.

The squeaky-voiced princess, played by a twenty-two-year-old actress named Eileen Bowman, greeted stars in the orchestra section, then sauntered onstage to sing what quickly became an infamous duet with Rob Lowe, who looked shell-shocked as he butchered a rewritten version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival rocker Proud Mary. Used to work a lot for Walt Disney / Starring in cartoons every night and day, Bowman warbled, and then Lowe picked up the story: But you said good-bye to Doc and Sleepy / Left the dwarf behind, came to town to stay … The impossibly cheesy number, which went on for an agonizing twelve minutes, also included dancing tables, a high-kicking chorus line of ushers, and Merv Griffin singing I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts in front of a batch of legendary stars sprinkled across the stage like so much window dressing. His mistake was having that first number go on for so long, says Gilbert Cates, who would in subsequent years produce the Oscar show himself. When you see something that doesn’t work, by four minutes it’s terrible, by five minutes it’s outrageous, by eight minutes it’s the kiss of death, and by twelve minutes it’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

Not long after the opening number, Carr visited the press tent behind the Shrine. How’s the food? he asked the reporters, some of whom were simultaneously trying to watch the show on monitors, interview winners and presenters, and grab sandwiches from a modest buffet. When asked his opinion of the show so far, Carr beamed. We couldn’t be happier.

Midway through the evening, another fifteen-minute production number showcased twenty stars of tomorrow singing a regrettable anthem entitled I Wanna Be an Oscar Winner. (A super-trouper, super-duper Oscar winner, no less.) The youngsters included Corey Feldman doing a Michael Jackson impersonation, Christian Slater sword fighting with Tyrone Power, Jr., Patrick Dempsey undertaking a soft shoe, Chad Lowe emoting (I’m a thespian in the classic sense!), fifteen-year-old Savion Glover tap-dancing (one bit of actual talent on display), and other offerings from Blair Underwood, Holly Robinson, Joely Fisher, Keith Coogan, Patrick O’Neal, Carrie Hamilton, Ricki Lake, Tricia Leigh Fisher, Corey Parker, Tracy Nelson, D. A. Pawley, Tracy Edwards, Melora Hardin, and Matt Lattanzi, most of whom looked vaguely embarrassed. For the record, none of the twenty have come close to winning an Academy Award in the ensuing years, though Christian Slater won an MTV Movie Award for most desirable male and Chad Lowe watched his wife, Hilary Swank, pick up an Oscar for Boys Don’t Cry.

Elsewhere on Carr’s show, the chitchat between his carefully matched presenters was cutesy and interminable. The best-picture award was entrusted not to Loretta Young but to the less legendary but (to Carr’s mind) more fabulous Cher, who dressed for the occasion in a fringed, strapless mini. Reading from the TelePrompTer and addressing his wife, Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum could have been speaking for most of the participants when he asked, Have we lost our sense of dignity … here?

Still, many of those present were swept up in the sheer exuberance of the producer’s outlandish vision. When the show ended and the credits began to roll, it was quiet in Club Oscar until Carr’s name appeared on the screen. Then Bruce Willis began to applaud, quickly joined by most of the stars in the room. At the Governors Ball, remembers Margolis, Everybody was flying high. There was a buzz in the room, people were talking about how different it was. And then the shit hit the fan the next morning.

It began early, as Academy president Richard Kahn was sitting at his desk. I was basking in the terrific ratings and the reaction we’d gotten, remembers Kahn. And at about 9:15 I took another phone call, which I thought would be somebody else telling me what a great show it was. The caller was Frank Wells, the president of the Walt Disney Company and one of the most respected executives in Hollywood. I think we have a real problem, Wells said.

Carr had not cleared the use of Snow White, and Wells wanted a formal apology. By midday, Disney lawyers were threatening to sue for copyright infringement; by the end of the day, they’d carried out the threat. Kahn drafted an apology that was delivered at a press conference eleven days later. Carr attended the press conference, and then the devastated producer called Jeff Margolis in tears.

Critics savaged his show: one of the most grotesque television broadcasts in recent memory, said film critic David Ehrenstein in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Gregory Peck wrote Kahn a letter saying it looked like the Photoplay Awards, a reference to a tacky show put on by the now-defunct movie magazine, and threatening to give back his two Academy Awards if subsequent shows were going to look like Carr’s. Seventeen Academy members, including Peck, Paul Newman, Billy Wilder, and Julie Andrews, wrote an open letter calling the show an embarrassment to both the Academy and the motion picture industry—although Kahn says, I collared the people one by one, and most of them expressed no recollection of putting their names on that letter.

Carr never knew what hit him. He briefly tried to come to his own defense, claiming that former president Ronald Reagan called it the best television show I’ve ever seen, and showing Los Angeles Times reporter Charles Champlin a stack of laudatory letters and telegrams. One came from agent Michael Ovitz, for whom the night had been a particular triumph: the movie Ovitz had shepherded through years of adversity, Rain Man, had been the big winner. You brought show business back to the movie business, Ovitz wrote.

But the complaints overwhelmed the kudos, and Carr sank into a depression that gripped him for years. He was blindsided completely, and it devastated him, said Seligman. His biggest mistake was to tell everybody beforehand that he was going to do a show better than any other producer, because that set every previous producer against him. And when he failed, he completely lost respect in the community. He never got over that.

Gil Cates sympathizes with his predecessor as well. I think Allan got a bad rap, and I think it hurt him beyond measure, says Cates. Had that first number been three minutes long, Allan Carr might still be alive and still be producing the show.

Years later, Carr briefly surfaced for the twentieth-anniversary rerelease of Grease. Otherwise, he stayed out of sight. He died ten years after his Oscar show, without having done much in the interim. The cause of death was liver cancer, but some thought that other factors contributed.

It’s a true tragedy, says Seligman. It killed him. Frankly, I think, more than anything else, the reaction to that show really killed him.

IF IT WAS A DISASTER ON MANY LEVELS, Allan Carr’s show shaped the modern Academy Awards in more ways than the producer could have realized. Much of what has happened to the Oscars since then has been a reaction against the Carr show: the Academy convened a panel to figure out what went wrong and how to keep it from happening again, and then hired the man who headed that panel, Cates, to produce eleven of the next fifteen shows. Carr’s show caused a backlash that restored dignity to the Oscar show … if you can call David Letterman’s Top Ten List or Whoopi Goldberg’s double entendres dignified. It doomed large-scale production numbers … but only until Debbie Allen and Paula Abdul began choreographing battalions of dancing fish, genies, and lions. It did away with cute chat between presenters … briefly, if at all. Carr’s, in fact, was a night whose excesses weren’t all that far removed from some of the excesses seen on shows produced by the guy who was hired to be the anti-Carr, or the others who followed him.

He brought the show into the new era, insists Richard Kahn, and did things that had never been done before but are now tradition. Carr was the one who replaced the phrase and the winner is … with the less exclusionary and the Oscar goes to … He was the first to hire a fashion coordinator and stage an Oscar Fashion Show, the first to hand out Oscar nominee sweatshirts, the first to take the crucial step of finding corporate partners for promotional tie-ins. He was the first to turn the green room into a glamorous showpiece, a true sanctuary for stars. He was the first producer to hire writer Bruce Vilanch, who has been the chief comic voice of the show ever since.

That was widely felt to be a disastrous show, both inside and outside the Academy, but it’s amazing how many of the innovations that Mr. Carr introduced are still with us today, says Bruce Davis. He was selected because he was a showman, and by God, he did some things that were fun, and that we still do. It’s hard to change the Oscars, but he was an energizing force.

Jeff Margolis defends the show even more avidly. There was a sameness to the shows before that, and Allan really turned it on its ass, he says. People were walking out of there going, ‘What the hell just happened?’ which was great. Allan was just what the show needed.

To me, there is no question that Allan Carr’s show paved the way for what has happened since then, says Chuck Workman, an Oscar winner who has made short films for most of the shows since 1988. Often, I think that it takes a terrible disaster to let people see what is possible. You see that in politics: at Kent State, four students got killed, but that was the point where the hippies won. And you see that in popular culture all the time. Something is totally disastrous, somebody went too far, but the next person senses what is possible. We have to give Allan Carr his due for that.

THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS have been a period in popular culture in which Allan Carr, under different circumstances, would have felt at home. The flamboyant, outsized producer, enamored of glamour and excess and celebrity, had embraced the hedonistic indulgences of the disco era and the shiny consumption of the eighties; had he been a participant rather than a broken man during the nineties, he could have enjoyed the pace of an era in which the media and the public eagerly built up, knocked down, embraced, and discarded celebrities and wannabees with astonishing speed.

The show that helped destroy Carr has been a significant part of the process. From the rise of the independent film to the decline of the major television networks, from the success of brain-dead blockbusters to the burgeoning of movie marketing as a contact sport—over the past fifteen years, the Academy Awards have been a battleground in which the themes running through the entire entertainment industry have played out.

At stake is the most widely recognized symbol of excellence in the entertainment industry—and also, clearly, one of the most potent marketing tools ever created. The monetary value of an Academy Award varies widely from film to film—generally speaking, the more successful a movie is before winning an Oscar, the less it benefits—but in most cases it reaches into the tens of millions of dollars. For the city of Los Angeles, the state of California, the movie industry in general, the value of the show is even harder to quantify, though the Los Angeles Times once estimated the figure at nearly $650 million, factoring in everything from the cost of trade advertisements to the money spent on pre- and postshow parties.

Advertising during the Oscar show alone brings ABC more than $75 million, of which as much as half goes to the Academy for broadcast rights. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences pays for the production of the show, which costs more than $10 million; events surrounding the show add many more millions to the cost. What’s left from ABC’s fee is enough to cover virtually all of the Academy’s annual operating budget.

The Academy has other sources of income: its membership dues bring in more than $1 million each year, while the organization built up an endowment worth tens of millions through fund-raising efforts that began in the early 1990s. But just as the Oscar show brings in the lion’s share of the Academy’s income, so has it become to most people the public face of the organization, and of Hollywood. The Academy operates a world-class film archive, awards screenwriting fellowships, and runs year-round screenings, exhibitions, and lectures—but to the public, it has a singular identity as the group that hands out Academy Awards.

The irony here—that an organization devoted to motion pictures supports itself by selling the rights to a TV show—is not lost on Academy officials. But they’ve embraced it, making sure that the Oscar show is always designed with TV viewers rather than the theater audience in mind.

Most years, the Oscars attract more of those viewers than any other nonsports program on television. The best-picture winner is usually seen by far more people on the Oscar show than in theaters; in recent years, only Forrest Gump, Titanic, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King have boasted the kind of attendance figures that might rival their Oscar-night audiences. The party line that the Oscars are watched by a billion people is a lie, as the Academy will admit when pressed—but viewers still number well into the hundreds of millions, making the show a rival of the Super Bowl as the most watched telecast around the world.

The Super Bowl kills us in the United States, and we don’t have accurate figures for the rest of the world, concedes Bruce Davis. But if you think about it, what’s more popular around the world—American movies, or American football? I think we catch up to them in other countries.

Particularly over the past ten years, scrutiny of the event has increased on nearly every level. Dozens of magazines and nearly as many television shows are devoted to the lifestyles, foibles, and missteps of the rich and famous, and to them the Oscars are the main event. No other night is quite so resplendent with the top echelon of stardom, quite so grand a showcase for celebrity in all its finery and its absurdity. But in a culture highly attuned to competition, as witnessed in everything from the Super Bowl to American Idol, the Oscars are also irresistible in the way they ruthlessly turn the stars into haves and have-nots, supplying far more of the latter than the former. When those five boxes appear on the screen showing the faces of the nominees as the envelope is opened, who doesn’t want to catch the losers in that moment of disappointment that proves impossible to hide? The show also fits neatly into the desire to track celebrities through every predictable moment of the Behind the Music or True Hollywood Story arc: Winona’s down, Nicole’s back, Whitney’s heading for a fall … The Oscars can serve equally well as the moment of redemption, or as the pride that goeth before the fall.

The Academy Awards also reflect, more and more fully, the vicious side of Hollywood. In the 1980s, as the post—Star Wars blockbuster mentality firmly took control of Hollywood’s major studios, the Oscars were one time of year when the studios could tell themselves it wasn’t all about money. Even if studios were desperate for the next Top Gun or Rambo, Hollywood could point to Academy Awards for smaller films like Kiss of the Spider Woman or Tender Mercies as proof that the business was still about art and commerce.

But a business accustomed to the cutthroat pursuit of money could easily adapt to the cutthroat pursuit of gold statuettes. Over the past fifteen years, Oscar campaigns have displayed a nearly unprecedented ferocity. Ironically, more than a few of the campaign tricks came straight from Allan Carr’s strategy for landing The Deer Hunter a best-picture win in 1979. Carr persuaded EMI and Universal to open the movie late in the year, building the buzz through special screenings and making it the movie of the moment precisely at the time when Oscar ballots would be in the mail. A decade later, this would be a strategy frequently used to great effect by Miramax as the company revolutionized Oscar campaigning.

But the strategy of opening late was only a start. Ad campaigns relying solely on genteel for your consideration ads in the Hollywood trade papers became a rarity, replaced by multifront campaigns encompassing parties, talk shows, celebrity endorsements, and the use of occasional underhanded tactics that ranged from artfully obscuring the true nature of your film to quietly bad-mouthing an opponent’s entry.

The Academy finds the very thought of Oscar campaigns to be distasteful, along with the idea that those campaigns have any influence on voters. The organization is well aware that the importance and significance of the Academy Awards is tied to the perception that they genuinely are awarded for merit. When Halle Berry broke down sobbing after winning the best-actress Oscar in 2002, she was not doing so because her win meant another $20 million in box-office grosses and video sales for Monster’s Ball, or because her asking price had just gone up; the numbers that affected her were the 6,000 voters who’d chosen her as the best, rather than the 600 million viewers who watched it happen. To safeguard that prestige, the Academy had spent much of the last decade fine-tuning its regulations that relate to campaigning, reacting as studios have violated the letter and the spirit of the law, and punishing the most serious transgressions.

At this point, though, even the Academy would not pretend that its annual awards are, or ever were, an artistic oasis unsullied by the mercenary zeal of the movie business. Oscar statuettes are the most valuable prizes to be accumulated by companies determined to accumulate both money and prizes by any means necessary.

At the center of these questions about intention and competition is the Academy Awards show itself. Whether you celebrate the Oscars as a sincere effort to honor artistry, or condemn them as a symptom of all that is wrong with Hollywood, the show is often irresistible television. It’s a glitzy, glamorous, frequently god-awful display of fashion; it’s a variety show, an increasingly rare commodity on TV, in which big stars sing songs you probably don’t recognize; it’s a chance to watch rich and famous people attempt to act pleased when somebody else wins an award. For three and a half or four hours, Hollywood’s (and, often as not, a handful of the world’s) brightest, most beautiful, and occasionally best get all dressed up, parade in front of cameras, and then pretend to be pleased as 80 percent of them go home losers.

In the last decade and a half, the Academy Awards broadcast has reached record lengths on three separate occasions, while battling a trend of declining ratings for network television. It has showcased four different hosts, and served as a sometimes eager, sometimes reluctant vehicle for the coronation of such outsized egos as James Cameron and Harvey Weinstein. At times, it has seemed irrelevant to the battles waged elsewhere in Hollywood; other times it has been a perfect case study in those battles. It is still the grandest, wildest celebration, dogfight, fashion show, and circus ever staged by the movie business. And just as in Allan Carr’s day, dance numbers are still roundly panned, viewers still go to the refrigerator during the endless procession of technical awards, and presenters still look lost when they try to talk to each other.

IN EARLY 1994, the Academy agreed to give Premiere magazine unprecedented access to production meetings and rehearsals for that year’s Oscar show, as well as backstage access during the show itself. While the rest of the massive Oscar press corps was invited to staged events and sequestered in the press room during the show, I was allowed to cover the event from the inside. Although the arrangement was initially envisioned as one time only, the Academy and the producers of the Oscar shows continued to allow me access in ensuing years. The degree of that access has varied slightly, but for the most part I have been allowed near-total entree into an event that receives saturation coverage, but only from the outside; that draws intense scrutiny for about two months, then fades.

It has the most glorious short life of any enterprise that I’ve ever been involved with, said Gil Cates, the most frequent producer of Oscar shows over the past fifteen years. When you finish shooting a movie, you have to edit it, and afterward there’s a life on television, on cable, on tape, in foreign markets. If you do a play, even if it closes there’s the potential of an afterlife somewhere. The Academy Awards show lives gloriously in over a hundred countries for three and a half hours, and then it’s gone. And I guess the reason I keep coming back to the well is that the process just astonishes me.

The goal of this book is to look inside that process, at the unseen, unguarded side of the Oscars. In studying the negotiations and machinations, the politics, the compromises, and the excesses of a strange, extraordinary event, I also hope to sketch a portrait of fifteen years of shifting currents, adjustments, and upheaval in the motion picture industry.

A NOTE ON DATES: The Academy refers to Oscar shows by the year during which the eligible movies were released. The show that takes place in February 2005, for instance, is officially the 2004 Oscars. I have tried to avoid that labeling as often as possible, because I’m dealing more with the Oscar shows themselves than with the movies under consideration. Thus, if I mention the seventy-fifth Oscar show, which took place in March 2003, I’ve tried to call it the Oscars in 2003 rather than the 2002 Oscars. I know that’s not how the Academy likes to identify its shows, but I find it less confusing.

Introduction

History Is Made at Night

IT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE MUCH ON PAPER. Tucked away in the middle of a statement of aims drafted by the newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was a modest suggestion, almost an afterthought. The organization, it suggested, should encourage its young industry in a variety of ways, including handing out awards of merit for distinctive achievement.

Awards weren’t the point of the new Academy, which was formed in 1927 in large part to consolidate power in the hands of Hollywood studios and producers, and by doing so to stem the tide of unionization by workers in the fledgling industry. The document drafted by the group’s thirty-six founders, which emphasized the noble more than the practical, put the emphasis on ideals like promoting harmony among movie professionals, protecting the honor and good repute of the industry, and meeting outside attacks from both church and state. In fact, the idea of awards wasn’t even pursued until a year after the organization’s founding, during which time the Academy had already intervened in a looming labor dispute, raised $35,000 for victims of floods along the Mississippi River, and begun a library of material related to motion pictures.

Initially, Academy Awards were given out in a dozen categories: actor, actress, director, comedy direction, cinematography, interior decoration, the catchall engineering effects, three writing awards (adaptation, original story, and title writing), and the confusing tandem of best production and artistic quality of production. The winners were chosen by a committee of five, one from each of the Academy’s branches. The committee was overseen by MGM chief Louis B. Mayer, hardly a disinterested observer.

Mayer, the driving force behind the formation of the Academy, was an autocratic boss who ran the most influential of Hollywood’s studios, and by extension much of the town as well. Born in Russia but raised in Canada, the conservative and moralistic Mayer controlled the contracts of an enormous collection of stars, painting himself as a father figure while keeping a tight hand on the purse strings. The idea of the Academy had been floated during a small dinner at Mayer’s home, and while he stayed out of the limelight (the actor Douglas Fairbanks, the organization’s first president, having been deemed a better public face for the Academy), Mayer was known to cajole, argue, and otherwise pull strings behind the scenes.

The first Academy Awards took place on May 16, 1929, in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The midsized banquet room, which sits across the street and less than a block west of the current site of the Oscars, the Kodak Theatre, hosted less than three hundred Academy members and guests, who partook of dinner and dancing before Fairbanks handed out statuettes to the winners and scrolls to the runners-up. The only recipient to make a speech was Darryl F. Zanuck, who accepted a special award for The Jazz Singer—which, as a talking picture, had been ruled ineligible for the regular awards. Another special award—and, in a way, another consolation prize—went to Charlie Chaplin, who’d failed to be nominated after writing, directing, producing, and acting in The Circus.

At that first ceremony, there had been no attempt to create suspense: the winners had all been announced three months before the banquet, and two of those winners—best actor Emil Jannings and Paramount head Adolph Zucker, accepting the best-production award for Wings—had already been given their statuettes.

Slowly, though, the awards and the presentation underwent a metamorphosis. The second year, the Academy tried to clear up the problems caused by two de facto best-picture awards, consolidating best-production and artistic quality of production categories into a single best-picture award. The engineering award was eliminated, the three writing awards reduced to one, and the two directing awards to one. Four of the seven awards went to founding members of the Academy, including one to art director Cedric Gibbons, the man who also designed the statuette. Mary Pickford was named best actress for Coquette, a movie that had not been well received, intensifying criticism of the committee system. After the ceremony, the Academy decided that all its members would henceforth be allowed to vote.

But raising the number of voters from five to four hundred did not end complaints about the results, or about the pervasive influence of studio bosses. The following year, Greta Garbo’s acclaimed performance in Anna Christie was overlooked for best actress in favor of Norma Shearer, the wife of MGM executive Irving Thalberg. Rumors flew that the studio, which released both Garbo’s and Shearer’s films, had urged all its employees in the Academy to vote for the latter. What do you expect? snapped Joan Crawford of Shearer’s win. She sleeps with the boss.

Throughout much of the 1930s, the Academy Awards remained a collegial event, designed more for the industry pals who filled banquet rooms than for the general public. Although a local radio station broadcast segments of the show beginning in its second year, postdinner entertainment usually consisted of nothing livelier than protracted speechmaking. In 1931, in fact, so many notables got up to talk—beginning with the vice president of the United States, Charles Curtis—that the awards weren’t handed out until after midnight. By the time Marie Dressler was named best actress for Min and Bill, ten-year-old nominee Jackie Coogan had fallen asleep on her shoulder. Dressler had to gently dislodge him before accepting her award.

Over the next few years, the Academy saw its award grow in stature and importance, and also acquire the nickname of Oscar—though it’s still uncertain whether the moniker came from Academy librarian Margaret Herrick, actress Bette Davis, or gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, all of whom claimed responsibility. Those years also produced the show’s first dead heat (Fredric March won the 1932 best-actor race by a single vote over Wallace Beery, but Academy rules considered anything closer than three votes a tie) and the only write-in winner in its history, cinematographer Hal Mohr for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Mohr had not been nominated, he believed, because of the ill will caused by his activism in the labor disputes that threatened Hollywood in the mid-1930s. The Screenwriters Guild and the Screen Actors Guild, both formed in 1933, were initially populated by writers and actors who’d quit the Academy, angry at its tacit support of Depression-era regulations that would have imposed salary ceilings and restricted the ability of actors to switch studios after fulfilling their contracts. The Screen Directors Guild was formed three years later, and like the other guilds encouraged its members to skip the Oscar ceremony. When the major studios followed by withdrawing their financial support of the floundering Academy, it fell to new president Frank Capra to right the sinking ship.

Capra, the thirty-eight-year-old, Sicilian-born director of It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, had gotten off to a rough start with the Academy. He’d first been nominated for best director for his 1933 movie Lady for a Day, and had attended the ceremony badly wanting to win. That night’s emcee, Will Rogers, had a folksy, conversational way of announcing the winners, and when he got to Capra’s category he rambled for a bit before announcing, Come on up and get it, Frank! In his autobiography, Capra said he got to his feet and was halfway to the stage before realizing, to his enduring embarrassment, that Rogers had been addressing Cavalcade director Frank Lloyd. But Capra made the walk for real the following year, when It Happened One Night won Oscars for best picture, actor, actress, adapted screenplay, and director.

After rewarding his movie with that unprecedented sweep of the top categories, the Academy made Capra its president during the stormiest time in the organization’s brief history. In an attempt to save the show in 1936, Capra turned the evening into a tribute to film pioneer D. W. Griffith, attracting stars who might otherwise have boycotted. He also moved to ensure the integrity of the voting process by hiring Price Waterhouse & Co. to collect and tabulate the votes.

In order to meet the deadlines for late newspaper editions, though, the Academy continued to give the results to the press at the beginning of the festivities. In 1937, this allowed an impatient best-actress nominee, Gladys George, to stroll through the press room and learn she’d lost to Luise Rainer; a disconsolate George headed for the ladies’ room, where she shared the bad news with fellow nominee Carole Lombard. Three years later, after the Los Angeles Times published the results in its 8:45 p.m. edition, which was carried into the show by late-arriving guests, the Academy decreed that envelopes would henceforth remain sealed until they were opened onstage.

Since the ninth Oscar show in 1937, those envelopes had included the new categories of supporting actor and actress. Character actor Walter Brennan won three of the first five supporting-actor Oscars, a record attributed in part to the fact that in 1938 the Academy had opened voting to members of all Hollywood guilds—including the populous Screen Extras Guild, whose members liked to honor those who, like Brennan, had come up through their ranks. The extras were also instrumental in the best-picture win for Casablanca in 1944. The Song of Bernadette had more nominations and was the odds-on favorite coming into the awards—but in an unusual if not unprecedented attempt to make it a prestige picture, 20th Century-Fox limited Bernadette to a few theaters in Los Angeles and New York, with tickets priced significantly higher than the nationwide average of 29 cents. After the Oscars, a survey of the Screen Extras Guild members, not the most well-heeled group of voters, showed that only one in four had even seen Bernadette, while almost all had seen Casablanca.

The show at which Casablanca won was also the first to be held in a theater rather than a banquet room, an expensive dinner dance having been deemed unseemly in wartime. Oscar winners during World War II received plaster statuettes, which were replaced with the gold-plated metal ones after the war ended. (Since 1941, the statuettes had carried a stipulation that still stands: winners were forbidden from reselling them without first offering them back to the Academy for ten dollars.)

As the war ended, another battleground heated up. Returning to prominence with the title role in Mildred Pierce after nearly a decade of lackluster, largely unsuccessful movies, actress Joan Crawford hired press agent Henry Rogers, who masterminded what might have been the first true Oscar campaign. While open solicitation of votes had proved fruitless when MGM became the first company to take out trade ads on behalf of the Eugene O’Neill drama Ah, Wilderness in 1935, Rogers’s style was subtler. Planting items in gossip columns, calling friends at the studios, and making sure Crawford was available and cooperative with anyone who wanted to talk about her maturation, by Oscar night he’d turned his client into the odds-on favorite—at which point a terrified Crawford refused to attend the show because, she said, she knew she was going to lose.

Undaunted, Rogers notified the press that his client was in bed with a 104-degree fever, while dispatching a hairdresser and makeup man to her house, just in case. Crawford won and director Michael Curtiz accepted on her behalf; back home in Brentwood, the actress managed to get out of bed, don an appropriately photogenic negligee, and sit with her groomers. When Rogers delivered her Oscar after the ceremony, Crawford was ready for her close-up. Said the admiring publicist later, The photo of her in bed clutching the Oscar pushed all the other winners off the front page.

The following year, members of the actors, writers, directors, and extras guilds were removed from the voting rolls. The guilds were still invited to participate in the nominations, but only Academy members made the final choices. Even with an influx of new members that more than doubled the size of the Academy, to sixteen hundred plus, the electorate was far smaller than the previous year’s total of more than nine thousand. With fewer voters to influence, campaigning by the studios picked up. That year, Rosalind Russell was the prohibitive best-actress favorite for Mourning Becomes Electra, but when Fredric March opened the envelope and read the name of Loretta Young, the audience was shocked—none more so than Russell, who’d already begun to rise from her seat in anticipation of a triumphant walk to the stage. Thinking quickly, Russell simply stayed on her feet and started clapping, appearing to graciously lead the standing ovation for her